Apple further stifling innovation and choice. Welcome to the new Microsoft. The difference? MS's users know that MS is full of crap. Apple's users are more then willing to spread the company FUD without question. This is why Apple is so bold. Too many of its damn users are still in the mindset of poor little 'o Apple is being picked on by X. Guess what. Apple is not poor, nor are they little. They are however a company that needs to be seriously looked at by the DoJ for its questionable business practices that are as aggressive as Microsoft's. Anyone who says otherwise is OK with Microsoft's business practices in the 90's and early 2K's.

Do people actually use Siri? My one co-worker with a 4S never used it beyond showing it off the first day he brought it into the office.

I have an iPhone 5. I use Siri pretty frequently-- it makes navigating a piece of cake "take me to <name of location I don't know the address of>". but I don't use it as much as maybe I expected-- it doesn't do punctuation, which makes sending messages with it a bit suboptimal.

And now Apple is starting to draw parallels with EA... taking something good and messing it up.

How can you make a definitive statement like that? You don't even know if Siri would have had legs under the start-up. Visualize Siri as it was when it first came out as a feature on Android phones, do you have any substantial argument to say that it would have gotten as much traction? Would it even be as well known as it is today?

Yes, Siri could have been very different. That's all we can conclude from what Ars has provided here. Leave the theorizing to those with no grounding.

The big problem with most voice command implementations is there's no directory or listing of things you might want to do. Guess and check just makes you look and feel like an idiot...

Like the old King's Quest games... Painful!

There is a list of things you can do. There is an info button (I) to the right of the greeting when you open Siri. It shows a list, and example commands. It opens the first time you launch Siri as well.

Apple further stifling innovation and choice. Welcome to the new Microsoft. The difference? MS's users know that MS is full of crap. Apple's users are more then willing to spread the company FUD without question.

That isn't how I read the article:

Quote:

Though Apple has expanded Siri since then, it still doesn't quite live up to the promise of the original app, which could interact with far more services than than it does today. Part of the slow integration with new services is due to Apple's efforts to expand Siri from English-only to dozens of languages. And negotiating licenses to hook into Web-based services has apparently been more complicated than it was for Siri when it was a small Silicon Valley startup, according to HuffPo's sources.

Seems to me that it is down to third parties seeing a cash cow or some other deliberate truculence because "Apple", or down to making it more accessible to those people who don't speak American's English.

Not everything Apple does or buys 'stifles' innovation you know. Apple are not "90's MS" - MS haven't been "90's MS" since the 90's either for that matter.

Do people actually use Siri? My one co-worker with a 4S never used it beyond showing it off the first day he brought it into the office.

I have an iPhone 5. I use Siri pretty frequently-- it makes navigating a piece of cake "take me to <name of location I don't know the address of>". but I don't use it as much as maybe I expected-- it doesn't do punctuation, which makes sending messages with it a bit suboptimal.

Android had voice commands before iOS, but it wasn't hyped or marketed like Siri, because voice recognition is far from perfect. Natural language recognition is far from perfect. Apple promoted Siri as a functional assistant, when it really isn't ready to act as one yet.

Do people actually use Siri? My one co-worker with a 4S never used it beyond showing it off the first day he brought it into the office.

For certain simple tasks Siri (or Google Voice) works very well for me.1. Calling family and friends; I say "call wife" and Siri gets it right every time. I don't need to use the number pad. I don't even need to look at the phone.2. Finding out the weather; I say "what is the temperature" and Siri tells me. This is very helpful. I also use Google Voice for those kinds of simple requests which also works very well.3. With turn by turn GPS on the iPhone, the Siri technology is tied into doing searches and setting up directions. Google Maps uses Google Voice for that. I just got back from vacation and using GPS with this voice technology made driving much easier.

Bottom line; These voice digital assistants (Siri and Google Voice) are very useful if it's understood what they are good at. I use them almost every day.

To those thinking Apple is stifling innovation, I'd lay good money down that the original owners of Siri started it with a goal of being acquired by someone. At least outwardly, the Holy Grail of acquisitions in consumer tech these days is Apple.

I'd say Siri got darn close to exactly what its creators intended. Bought by a large company for a handsome sum and continued development with global notoriety.

Android had voice commands before iOS, but it wasn't hyped or marketed like Siri, because voice recognition is far from perfect. Natural language recognition is far from perfect. Apple promoted Siri as a functional assistant, when it really isn't ready to act as one yet.

OK OK let me do one now...

Give me... a popular forum thread refrain… now I need an armchair marketing evaluation... okay now a blanket judgment with no supporting evidence… okay now restate the last thing in an even more general way… now something hand-wavey about marketing again… aaaaand something about how some technology isn't ready.

The article states that "Verizon had inked a deal in late 2009 to make Siri a default app on all new Android devices set to launch in 2010." This, coupled with the article title, sounds as though Verizon was going to put Siri on *all* Android devices. How would Verizon have done this?

Would this have been just Verizon's handsets?

Or was Verizon going to buy rights to Siri and add it to the Android Open Source Project, and then make the underlying web services available to all Android devices? That doesn't seem likely but clarification would be helpful.

Do people actually use Siri? My one co-worker with a 4S never used it beyond showing it off the first day he brought it into the office.

For certain simple tasks Siri (or Google Voice) works very well for me.1. Calling family and friends; I say "call wife" and Siri gets it right every time. I don't need to use the number pad. I don't even need to look at the phone.2. Finding out the weather; I say "what is the temperature" and Siri tells me. This is very helpful. I also use Google Voice for those kinds of simple requests which also works very well.3. With turn by turn GPS on the iPhone, the Siri technology is tied into doing searches and setting up directions. Google Maps uses Google Voice for that. I just got back from vacation and using GPS with this voice technology made driving much easier.

Bottom line; These voice digital assistants (Siri and Google Voice) are very useful if it's understood what they are good at. I use them almost every day.

I use both Siri and Google Voice depending. Siri is fine at setting simple reminders but isn't anywhere as solid when I ask "what time does xyz open?"

The later query in Siri tends to get lost in a poor web search while GV not only understands the question, it places the query in context and finds the nearest xyz. Ditto if I have to call store xyz GV is better at ferreting out the correct phone number than Siri is.

It makes more sense to me to have something like Siri on the iPad. I can work/play in an app and then ask SIRI to do something without being fully pulled away (i think) like update Facebook with something funny i just read or thought.

Of course I say this having completely forgotten (until now) that I have Siri on my iPad, so I don't know if it actually works like that.

Maybe Id remember I had it and used it more if there was some functions that didnt require an online connection and thus gave an error when it couldnt reach the server for some reason?

Do people actually use Siri? My one co-worker with a 4S never used it beyond showing it off the first day he brought it into the office.

It works very well for pre-filtering map results. Better than anything else. "Indian restaurant", "museum", "Trader Joe's". Admittedly a limited use case but it is so much faster than fiddling with the screen. And it more than makes up for for iOS 6's sub-par location data.

The article states that "Verizon had inked a deal in late 2009 to make Siri a default app on all new Android devices set to launch in 2010." This, coupled with the article title, sounds as though Verizon was going to put Siri on *all* Android devices. How would Verizon have done this?

Would this have been just Verizon's handsets?

Yes, of course. Surely you don't expect Verizon to be altruistic. They viewed it as a way to differentiate their phones from everyone else's. Like an android skin, except it wouldn't suck.

Android had voice commands before iOS, but it wasn't hyped or marketed like Siri, because voice recognition is far from perfect. Natural language recognition is far from perfect. Apple promoted Siri as a functional assistant, when it really isn't ready to act as one yet.

It also wasn't easily accessible (had to unlock the phone, then hold down a button to bring up the search, then press the voice button, and then speak), it never had particularly good results for me, and it would never respond with voice results (which is quite nice if you're walking through a downpour/blizzard, and don't want to hold out your phone to read the screen).

Google might have improved it since Siri's release to be more accessible, but prior to Siri it certainly wasn't a flagship feature by any stretch of the imagination. It was just some feature buried in the phone that most people didn't even know was there.

Don't care what it's called, Siri for iOS or whatever its called on Android:

The tech is just not ready, is overhyped... and is more of a gimmick than anything else.

It's occasionally useful to me, mostly in the form of sending a quick text message when stopped at a stop light or something similar. Otherwise the tech isn't just not ready its just not useful. I don't want to talk to my phone particularly in public. Why would I want to pull out my phone and announce everyone in hearing distance that I'm calling my wife or that I want to look-up something on Google.

A lot of hate on Siri. I regularly use it to get quick directions, call people, set alarms/timers and sometimes dictation for texts. It's good if you know what they are capable of. It could do more stuff, but I'm pretty happy with what it does now. I can't really think of many features I would use outside those things. The sports features they added are good but limited (like it will tell me when a game is, but it loses context if you then ask Siri to remind you about the game)

I don't particularly care what company came up with it, or what it's called, or what company I'm supposed to be all angry and butt-hurt about. All I know is I was rushing out the door to an appointment with a new insurance agent this morning, activated Siri, said, "directions to [name of agent]" and turn-by-turn got me there without me thinking about it. I'm sure Google's equivalent could do the same, or any one of a number of voice technologies. I don't care which I'm using, I'm just glad people smarter than me had the idea to create something like it, and I can now carry something in my pocket that does a pretty good job understanding commands I speak into it. Fucking amazing.

It helps me, I use it. Done. Move on to the next problem. Like an adult.

Do people actually use Siri? My one co-worker with a 4S never used it beyond showing it off the first day he brought it into the office.

I use it all the time to create reminders. It's a lot faster than entering them manually. My main gripe with it is that it occasionally fails even when it has perfectly understood what I've said. This seems to have improved lately, though.

Do people actually use Siri? My one co-worker with a 4S never used it beyond showing it off the first day he brought it into the office.

While Siri isn't the magic intelligent assistant it hopes to be one day, it is pretty useful when you know its limitations. For example, my wife and I use Find my friends (we are the only ones we trust with this cool "big brother" feature). It's simple to ask, "Find my wife". Or set a reminder with "Remind me to call the electric company tomorrow". Alarms are simple too. "Wake me up at 6 am". or "What does my day look like".

Of course, you mileage may vary based on your accent too. "Siri, can you weckomend a westowant?"